Cooperative CPU+GPU deblocking filter parallelization for high performance HEVC video codecs

Heterogeneous platforms integrating several CPU cores and GPU accelerators have established in several application domains, from desktop, server and mobile. To take full advantage of such platforms, video encoders/decoders have to exploit a broader design space, by cooperatively executing in all the available CPU and GPU cores. To attain such objective, three novel contributions that aim the exploitation of the maximum parallelism level in an HEVC deblocking filter are presented: i) a highly optimized CPU parallel implementation, which outperforms the current state of the art; ii) the first known GPU implementation of the HEVC deblocking filter; and iii) an hybrid and load-balanced CPU+GPU implementation, where all the available resources cooperatively execute, in order to maximize the attained performance. The obtained experimental results demonstrated the ability to achieve processing times as low as 0.8 ms and 0.5 ms to filter 1080p I-type and B-type frames, respectively, corresponding to speedup factors as high as 17 and 9.